System Requirements

Low client and server base requirements are core features that keep Foswiki widely deployable, particularly across a range of browser platforms and versions. Many extensions exist which enhance and expand Foswiki's capabilities; they may have additional requirements.

Server Requirements

Foswiki is written in Perl 5, which is supported on Microsoft Windows as well as Unix and Unix-like systems (including Linux and OSX). On Unix-like systems, it uses a number of shell commands. It should be able to run out-of-the-box on any server platform that meets the following requirements.

Foswiki is designed to automatically detect the platform and generate a basic configuration the first time the configure script is run, but start from your expected default "view" URL, so that Foswiki can figure out your URL scheme.

Prior versions of Foswiki shipped with the important CPAN modules. Foswiki 2.0 does not, and you must ensure that the perl dependencies listed below are installed before attempting to use Foswiki. For a detailed report, System.PerlDependencyReport (admin access only!) or the shell script tools/dependencies.

If you are unable to install CPAN modules, see Foswiki:Extensions.CpanContrib. Install this extension into your Foswiki installation directory if you cannot install Perl modules otherwise.

You can check the dependencies before Foswiki is fully operational with the following command. It will list all potentially missing dependencies. Not all listed dependences are required on all installations, Refer to the usage message that accompanies each missing dependency in the report.

cd /path/to/foswiki
perl tools/dependencies

Specific distribution details

Find the closest match to your installed system. and click on the "Show ..." link to reveal the details.

Installation with CPAN

Perl dependencies can also be installed on most systems using cpanm, aka App::cpanminus. On most unix* systems, cpanminus can bootstrap itself using curl or wget.
If run as root, the modules will be installed in the System perl. Otherwise they are installed into the users local environment.

Perl Module

Notes

Algorithm::Diff

Archive::Tar

*First shipped in perl 5.9.3

Authen::SASL

Optional, needed for authenticated SMTP

CGI

CGI::Session

Crypt::PasswdMD5

Digest::SHA

Included with perl

Error

Email::MIME

Encode

File::Copy::Recursive

HTML::Parser

HTML::Tree

IO::Socket::IP

IO::Socket::SSL

Optional, support encrypted email connection: STARTTLS or SSL

JSON

Locale::Maketext

Locale::Maketext::Lexicon

Optional, needed for internationalization

Locale::Msgfmt

Optional, needed for internationalization

LWP

LWP::Protocol::https

URI

version

Must be version 0.77 or newer, included with perl 5.10.1 and newer.

To install the above packages with cpanm

Note: We do not recommend installing CPAN modules with cpanminus as root.
See below for information on using a private module library with cpanminus.

Installation using cpanminus

If you want to install the dependendencies into a specified location, add the "-l" option to cpanm, and add the lib path to bin/LocalLib.cfg. The dependencies will be installed under the specified location, in the lib/perl5 subdirectory.
Example: User "foswiki" logs in and installs the libraries locally under the foswikideps directory: